By Frank Stricker
March 22, 2025
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) numbers in the jobs report for February do not show any spectacular changes. It is too early to see much of an impact from Trump-Administration layoffs. But there were hints, however small, that in some areas, all was not well.
The official unemployment rate rose by a tenth of a percent to reach 4.1%. Not much and still low. But the National Jobs for All Network’s (NJFAN) Hidden Unemployment Rate–what I think of as the real unemployment rate–was already very high at 9.5% in January. It increased to 10.2% in February. And that number registered increases in each of the rate’s components. The number of officially unemployed people increased by .3 million to reach 7.1 million. The number of people working part-time who wanted full-time work increased by .4 million to 4.9 million. And the number of people who wanted to work but had not searched lately or in a way that the BLS deems a real search—this group increased by .3 million to reach 5.9 million. The total number of truly unemployed grew from 16.8 to 17.9 million, and the real unemployment rate jumped from 9.5% of the labor force to 10.2%.
It is also noteworthy that for specific social groups in the population, some of the numbers are not good. Unemployment rates for teens are always high, but they are especially high for minority teens. In February the white teen unemployment rate was 11%; the rates for Hispanics and Blacks were 13.8% and 19.2%.
We need millions of additional jobs to cut into these and other high unemployment numbers. Reports from non-farm employers (the Establishment numbers) showed that we added 151,000 jobs in February. That’s a positive but not exactly a jobs boom. (The monthly average of additions for the last 12 months was 168,000.)
Other signs of negative or mediocre performance include the fact that the number of jobs in the Federal Government fell by 10,000 in February. Not so many, but in the next unemployment report government layoffs will be huge. The latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLT) report shows that through January, the layoff rate in the government sector was not rising. But the next issue of JOLT numbers, due April 1, will begin to reflect massive government layoffs.
Finally, the latest report on real earnings—measuring pay in terms of purchasing power—is not encouraging. For production and non-supervisory employees over a year, real hourly earnings were up just 1.4% and real weekly earnings just 1.1%. That’s a positive, but so much more is needed to lift dozens of millions of workers who have to get by on poverty-level pay. In the last five months, real hourly pay for average workers went up 0.1% in three months and down 0.1% in two months. Total real gain: 0.1%. Not exactly a sign of high demand for labor. And what will things look like as the country is flooded with fired government employees? Not to mention workers laid off in the private sector due to cancelled government contracts.
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Frank Stricker is on the board of the National Jobs for All Network and writes for NJFAN and Dollars and Sense. In 2020 he published a book called American Unemployment: Past, Present, and Future (2020). He taught History and Labor Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills, for 37 years.
